


another season of hiding

by viverella



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Backstory, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), F/M, Flashbacks, Not Canon Compliant, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-23 08:00:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17076464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viverella/pseuds/viverella
Summary: “I’ll find you, even at the end of the world.”This is a promise they’ve always made to each other, back when the end of the world seemed like it would never come.





	another season of hiding

**Author's Note:**

> ME? writing clintnat fic again? what year is this? who am I? 
> 
> honestly I don't know why I'm writing this except that 2 seconds from the endgame trailer gave me v intense nostalgia and I really also just wanted to prove to myself that I could like........... finish writing a fic so here we are!! back at it again with a weird atmospheric fic that kinda makes no sense and entirely disregards the parts of MCU canon that I hate with a burning passion!! just like old times, eh?
> 
> title borrowed from the poem quoted in part below.

_I think I could love you until even the sun grows tired  
of coming back every _

_spring to forgive us for another season of hiding  
but it is not like me to be brave_

— From _In This Scene_ by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

  
  
  


_“I’ll find you, even at the end of the world.”_

This is a promise they’ve always made to each other, back when the end of the world seemed like it would never come. It’s a fool’s promise, mostly, because it’s never like they were ever in the same place for long enough to really be called a _them_. But it’s become like a mantra anyways, like if they pretend this is a promise they could ever keep, the world could stop being so loud and so full and so much all the time. A promise, maybe, for a constant neither of them could ever guarantee. A promise, maybe, that there could ever be a future, an after, an end to all of this that they do.

Natasha remembers the first time he said it to her, all those years ago, remembers laughing. She was so young then, and still a full of thorns, and he was young too, and less weary than he is now, less hopeless. Sometimes she remembers that he used to be the type of man who’d come up with something like this, who’d say this to her on a rooftop in Riyadh in the sweltering heat of summer, who’d say this to her even though they weren’t even playing for the same team yet. 

_If it weren’t for Budapest, maybe_ , she thinks. 

“Don’t get your hopes up,” she’d said then, and at the time, they’d both meant the words as jabs, the sort of gentle things that become more playful over time, but jabs nonetheless. 

And they just kept running into each other. Beijing. Ankara. Buenos Aires. Geneva. Each time maybe just too familiar. Each time maybe just not taking their jobs seriously enough. It was there by the time Natasha joined up with SHIELD, the warmth, the quiet candor. It was there even as their careers within the bureau diverged, the closeness, the tenderness. 

It’s not something they’ve ever talked about, not really, the way the teasing words turned into something more real, something more like salvation. They’ve never had to, in a way. They were always young and invincible, and even as their lives and careers neatly crisscrossed each other and their assignments grew apart and they saw less and less of each other except maybe in passing (except maybe in spare stolen moments on borrowed time), they were never the sort of people who thought about what came after, anyway. SHIELD is sneaky like that, in a way. 

Natasha realizes that she’s never thought about what it’d be like if the phrase became something like an old saying. She realizes she’s never thought about what it’d be like if _they_ became old, never thought about what the end would look like, and now that it’s here, staring her in the face, glaring at her in the endless lists of lives lost, she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She realizes then that maybe she’s gotten so good at the doing, that she never stopped to think about who or why or how. So little trust in anything but the process. 

The process is what she returns to, in the end. She’s a creature of habit, she realizes, once the window-dressing has been cleared away. Check the known radio frequencies. Listen to the scanners. Reach out to contacts from the old days. There are still spiders out there in the world after all. 

\---

She remembers the early days, trying to say the words like trying to remove peanut butter stuck to the roof of her mouth. It used to be so foreign, making promises as far-flung and idealistic like this. It always felt a little too much like lying, even though that’s what she’s paid to do. 

She remembers, once, finding herself at Clint’s apartment in Bed-Stuy after hearing through the grapevine that something went horribly awry during his previous mission, wondering a little why she couldn’t ever hear anything right from the horse’s mouth. And she’s thinking about how this is the first time he’s lost someone he was supposed to be protecting, the first time he’s seen all that chaos up close because he’d been thrown right into the middle of it all. She’s thinking about all the times she’s failed and somehow just knows that it’s never felt as bad for her as it does for him. She’s thinking and she knocks and it takes her half a second to remember that she’s never been there before. 

“Natasha,” he says when he opens the door, her name coming out in one quick breath like a gasp, like he’s been startled, like his worlds are colliding in a way they never should have. Behind him, she hears a dog barking. 

Natasha remembers trying for a smile that maybe halfway succeeds in being as gentle as she means for it to be, remembers how anything soft used to feel like daggers in her chest. 

“Found you,” she jokes, the rest of the sentiment getting somewhere lodged in her chest. 

He scratches the back of his neck, shifting his weight just so. “It’s not the end of the world,” he says, sounding a little like he’s heard what she’d wanted to say anyway. 

It hits somewhere deep in her chest, like an old war wound opening up. She remembers wanting to say something, something real for once, but finds that, as always, the words get stuck in her throat. A dog that looks like some kind of lab mix pokes his head between Clint’s legs and the doorframe. Natasha cracks a smile that feels just a touch more genuine, feeling a little out of practice. 

“I didn’t know you had a dog,” she says, reaching her hand out for the dog to sniff. He licks her hand and nudges his head into her palm. 

Clint leans against the doorframe and crosses his arms, something gentler than she’s used to seeing rising to his face. “I didn’t know you owned sweatpants,” he says, the familiar mocking lilt returning to his voice. 

Natasha looks down at her outfit. “These are joggers,” she says, not even sure what she’s saying or why, “And they’re very trendy, thank you.”

Clint laughs then, and Natasha feels something ease in her chest, the irrational bubble of anxiety that’s been living in her chest since she heard about his mission finally melting away. And as they stand in the hall, Natasha scratching Clint’s dog behind his ears and Clint smiling at her like there’s something she’s not getting here, Natasha finds herself thinking, _thank god. It’s not the end of the world after all._

\---

Maybe the reason why Natasha’s held onto this silly promise for so long is that there’s a naïve part of her, something soft and tender still despite her training, despite what the Red Room tried to do to her, that needs something to hold onto. In her line of work, the world is too dark and uncertain and dangerous, and having just this one touchstone to hang onto, no matter how imagined, steadies her when the rest of the world seems to be on the verge of falling apart. 

It’s why, years later, when she’s taken and locked up in a cell in Sokovia, the dread she’d sort of expected never surfaces. It’s why, when she’s left alone in the dark cave that instead of setting to work picking the lock right away like she maybe would have expected of herself in her younger years, the first thing she does is dismantle one of her wrist cuffs to shoot out a distress signal into the channels that you’d only ever pick up on if you knew to check, thinking, knowing, that there’s no way it’ll go unheard. As she clips the makeshift homing beacon to her belt and starts fashioning something with which to pick the lock to her cell, (and though she doesn’t know it then, at the same time that Clint promises, _I’ll find her. I’ll find her_ ), she thinks, _don’t you dare let me down now._

By the time he catches up to her, she’s evacuating civilians through back alleys and side streets, thinking to herself that it’s only a matter of time before there won’t be anywhere to evacuate to but hoping that she’s slipped through the cracks just well enough that she has just a little more time, can rescue just a few more people. She doesn’t have the time, but if she did, she might be wondering when she became this person, might marvel at the fact that the hardened assassin from her youth has turned into someone who saves lives instead of taking them. 

Clint catches up to her by shooting down one of Ultron’s bot’s that’s crawling towards her like she’s suddenly in some kind of shitty zombie movie, and when she whips her head around to find him, she finds him grinning at her from atop a pile of rubble that used to be some kind of office building, like this is old times, like the end of the world hasn’t finally caught up to them. 

“Found you,” he says, his voice coming through the earpiece that Natasha’s kept on, hoping maybe to find him again before this is all over. 

“Took you long enough,” she shoots back, feeling a surge of something exhilarating shoot through her veins, feeling the energy return to her sluggish limbs. “You’re getting old.”

Even through the earpiece, Natasha hears Clint scoff. “Don’t make me regret saving you.”

Natasha doesn’t know if he can see her, but she grins anyway in that way that never fails to make him roll his eyes and shove her shoulder. “As if I ever needed that,” she says, and she’s met with a laugh, the kind that settles somewhere in her chest like a salve even though she’s exhausted and her body is screaming at her to rest. And she thinks that maybe, if this is the end of the world, that would be an okay thing to go out hearing.

\---

It’s not the end of the world then. The end of the world comes much later and much worse and much harder than she ever expected. And Natasha thinks to herself that she’s always prepared herself for things to end, because she’s never believed in anything as much as the certainty that nothing lasts forever, but she’s never prepared herself for what comes after that. She’s never expected an after, never prepared the uncertainty of not knowing what living means anymore with half her heart missing. She watches the people who she’s come to think of as family ( _family_ , she thinks to herself, wondering how that could have become such a familiar word) vanish before her eyes and then she returns home and feels small. Natasha has been lonely all her life, has known it even before she knew how to kill, has made it a home in her chest, locked behind a tightly sealed door so it won’t creep up on her when she’s not ready for it, but she’s never known a loneliness like this (except, maybe, she thinks, somewhere in the far recesses of her mind in brief flashes of winter in Siberia and a mad scramble to survive ahead of girls she’d grown to think of as her sisters). 

_We had a deal_ , she thinks out into the universe in her more selfish moments. _When the end of the world came, you’d take me with you._

The old channels are dead, all her many spiders out there in the world gone in a puff of smoke. She listens for messages she know won’t be coming and all she hears in return is the pop of static. She searches, every day, determined that this can’t be the end, because she’s still here and if she’s still here then he must be too. They had a promise, after all. 

There’s still a small part of her, maybe, that’s still hopeful, still naïve, still soft under the layers and layers of hard shell she’s tried to wrap around herself, even now, even after all this. She feels it throbbing inside her chest like an old wound that never healed properly, like there’s still some shrapnel caught under her skin somewhere. She wonders if it’s a habit she’ll ever outgrow, checking over her shoulder for any friendly faces that could possibly be left, hoping beyond hope that there’s still a little sliver of goodwill left in the world. Maybe, she thinks sometimes, she was never meant for this line of work anyway. Maybe, she thinks sometimes, she was always meant to turn away from how she was raised, to diverge from the strict path she was set on as a girl. 

_Maybe we need hope to keep going on_ , he’d said to her once. _Maybe being a little soft isn’t such a bad thing_.

That voice in the back of her head, that quiet thing that she keeps locked away deep in her memory, is why, perhaps, on a gloomy Wednesday morning, without even realizing it, she finds herself in Bed-Stuy, climbing those familiar creaky steps up to a door she’d know even in her sleep. There’s a dent in the door from when Clint attempted to single-handedly move a couch he’d found in the alley behind his building up the stairs, and the whole thing needs a fresh coat of paint, and Natasha has to jiggle the doorknob up and slightly to the left to get the door to push open past the warped doorframe. The hinges squeak and the wiggly floorboard under the doormat groans softly under her weight as she steps over the threshold, and something in her chest aches at the little signs of neglect that have always been there but now seem so ominous. 

It takes Natasha a moment, but as she lets the door swing shut behind her, she realizes that it all feels so wrong because all the other little noises she’s come to expect from this place have suddenly vanished. The clamber of the kids playing upstairs. The laughter of whoever is up sharing a beer on the roof. The chatter of neighbors catching up with each other. It takes her another moment to realize what all that means. It fills her with a sort of hollow dread that she can’t place. What, after all, is a home without its people? 

\---

 _I’ll find you. I’ll find you. I_ will _find you._

The old promise suddenly feels like a prayer, a reality she’s trying to wish into the world. Every day, the same rituals. Every day, the same routine. Checking her channels, crossing them off her list each and every day. The silence she hears in return is heavy and thick each day and the sound of static follows her everywhere she goes, even in her sleep, and each day she hopes for something like a miracle, hopes for anything, even just a crackle in the airwaves, something to tell her that someone out there is listening. She finds herself holding her breath some days, as if her stillness could possibly lead to her wishes coming true, and most days all she’s rewarded with is a stiff neck and popping joints for all her trouble. 

Then, one day, a little miracle. A sharp burst of noise on the other end of the line, like a child clumsily picking up the receiver to eavesdrop on an adult conversation. Natasha freezes, afraid to move, afraid to say anything, like she might scare a ghost. She waits for what feels like an eternity, and then the line goes dead. She smiles. Finally, a breadcrumb. 

The trail takes her halfway across the world, and when Natasha touches down in Tokyo several days later, it’s raining. Natasha’s been to Tokyo before, remembers loving it, the bustle and the energy of it, the anonymity she was able to find in the crowd if she just ducked her head just so. Tokyo now is nothing like the city she remembers. It’s empty and solemn and quiet, like a funeral waiting to start, or perhaps one that never ended. As she walks the streets, she sidesteps piles of debris suspiciously cluttering a usually spotless city, she glances down at her phone, squinting at the tiny map crammed onto its screen. The splatter of fat raindrops against the umbrella above her head covers her in a blanket of white noise, like the static that’s become her friend over the weeks and months. 

The dull thud of bodies hitting pavement draws her attention up and away, and she darts into the shadows of a nearby building on instinct alone. She peers around the corner of a nearby building to spot a hooded figure in the middle of a tussle with a handful of men and women. The clang of metal on metal rings loud in Natasha’s ears as the hooded man fends off his attackers in a flurry of weapons and artfully placed blows. Natasha’s breath catches in her throat and her heart begins to pound in her chest, so loud in her own ears that she’s almost sure that they must hear it. As she watches, the movements become more and more familiar, the center of balance, the distinct left-handed hook, and even though this man is wearing something Natasha has never seen before, she knows, and murmurs out a soft _thank you_ to the universe for seeing her through just one last time. 

When the fight ends, the man stands and wipes off the blade of his weapon, his back hunched under the hood of his robe, and Natasha straightens up from the shadows, clearing her throat and squaring her shoulders. The ring of her heels sounds loud to her own ears but must be muffled by the din of the rain, and he doesn’t notice her as he sheaths his sword, straightening up to leave. 

“Clint,” Natasha says, the single syllable rushing out of her mouth like it’s been waiting all this time to be spoken. 

Her voice rings loud and clear in the otherwise empty street, and she watches the surprise jolt through his shoulders before he reaches up to push his hood back off his head. He turns, his hair quickly growing slick in the heavy rain, and Natasha feels something jar loose and rattle around her chest. He’s older now, so much older than when they first met, too old to still be fighting other people’s battles. There are lines around his eyes that didn’t used to be there when they met that fateful day in Budapest that she can now see, even in the dim neon light, and his eyes are weary and lost. When he catches her gaze, something flickers across his face, and Natasha somehow knows he’s thinking of that old promise, that thin red string that’s held them together all of these years. She wonders if he, too, checked their old channels like she did, hoping to hear some confirmation that she hasn’t forgotten. She wonders if he, too, had dared to hope. 

She smiles, something small and sad but more real than anything she’s felt in months, and she says, a little like she’s promising something she knows she’ll always have to swear, just one more time, “Found you.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so very much for reading!!! comments/kudos are always so appreciated!
> 
> come find me on [tumblr](http://drbonesmccoy.tumblr.com)!


End file.
